CVE-2026-46021: Linux Kernel

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: thermal: core: Fix thermal zone governor cleanup issues If thermal_zone_device_register_with_trips() fails after adding a thermal governor to the thermal zone being registered, the governor is not removed from it as appropriate which may lead to a memory leak. In turn, thermal_zone_device_unregister() calls thermal_set_governor() without acquiring the thermal zone lock beforehand which may race with a governor update via sysfs and may lead to a use-after-free in that case. Address these issues by adding two thermal_set_governor() calls, one to thermal_release() to remove the governor from the given thermal zone, and one to the thermal zone registration error path to cover failures preceding the thermal zone device registration.

Affected products

• Linux Linux Kernel: from 4.2, before 6.6.140 (fixed in 6.6.140); from 6.7, before 6.12.86 (fixed in 6.12.86); from 6.13, before 6.18.27 (fixed in 6.18.27); from 6.19, before 7.0.4 (fixed in 7.0.4)

Published 2026-05-27. Last modified 2026-09-08.